In what promoters are calling a "Linux distribution built
for managers by managers", a new company called Pee-aitch-bee
Enterprises has unveiled "Notdows", a distro designed to "ease
the transition from Windows to Linux in every way possible."

A key component of Notdows is the killrandom daemon process,
which randomly kills running processes, faithfully simulating
the Windows experience. Over time, however, killrandom
will operate less frequently, allowing the user to smoothly
transition to a stable operating system.

"Ordinary distros built by geeks are designed to be as stable
as possible," said a Pee-aitch-bee developer/manager. "This
does not work well for some naive ex-Windows users, who become
disoriented and lost in such a foreign environment. While
recent versions of Windows are more stable than predecessors,
the difference between Windows and Linux can still be quite
jarring. We hope to ween these users away from Windows'
flakiness without causing unnecessary emotional duress."

The development process for Notdows is markedly different
from most open source projects. "We want our system to have an
optimum number of bugs to closely match Windows. Our developers
are rewarded for reaching a target of 1 bug per 1,000 lines
of code. In some cases bugs must be intentionally added in
order to achieve this objective. Our development platform,
code-named Reverse Bugzilla, makes this possible."

In some cases, however, Notdows has developed nasty bugs that
cancelled out other bugs. "We discovered that killrandom 1.2.23
had an ugly flaw that allowed the program to kill itself,
immediately causing the system to run at maximum stability. It
took awhile to diagnose the problem, but we knew something was
fishy when one of our development machines reached an uptime
of 61 days -- the average for a fresh Notdows installation is
3 days between reboots."

The Notdows developers do take security seriously, however. "We
like bugs, but not security holes," the developer said. "The
last thing we want is for crackers to trash somebody's system,
providing an opportunity for the user to wipe their hard drive
and decide to go back to Windows. However, for peace of mind,
we do include a dummy anti-virus program that pretends to scan
files but otherwise does nothing except make grinding sounds
on the hard drive."

In another nod to Windows, the standard Notdows system costs
an obscenely large amount of money. "While we do make the
whole thing available for free from our FTP site, we really
don't want our target audience to know that. They believe that
'more expensive' is always synonymous with 'more quality'. What
they don't know about anonymous FTP isn't going to hurt them..."